Demodulators are employed in vestigial side band (VSB) receivers to obtain in-phase (I-phase) and quadrature-phase (Q-phase) components of the received VSB signal. Prior known timing recovery systems, however, typically utilized only the I-phase component in attempts at obtaining adequate timing recovery. Additionally prior known systems employed an analog synchronous detector in combination with a digital phase-locked loop to recover timing. Such prior systems had relatively limited acquisition range and had limited accuracy in determining the location on an incoming synchronization signal in order to recover the timing of the incoming VSB signal.